Intentionally developing spaces that produce safe and meaningful social experiences can be daunting work, especially for those who are new to the concepts of digital thriving. Social behavior is complex, and creating something fun is already difficult enough for developers!
To make “social” simpler for you, we’ve assembled a collection of handy pro tips that cover a wide range of considerations: thriving, trust, disruption, rewards, and more.
We hope you find these tips useful!
- They thrive, we thrive — When people feel they are thriving, they will come, play, stay, and pay. That’s a great business case for digital thriving.
- Trust is a must — If people don’t trust your company, product, or users, they will leave. Increasing trust will unlock healthier engagement and greater retention.
- Hope is out of scope — Don’t let hope be the full scope of your work when it comes to social behavior and related problems. Behavior problems are inevitable, so design-out what you can and be prepared for the rest.
- Choosing to wait is choosing to lose — Don’t wait until players are pissed off to care about disruptive and prosocial behavior. Act early and you’ll keep more players.
- Social is a system (not a feature) — Social includes everything involving players. It’s not features like friend lists and chat (those are communication tools). Care about the entire system.
- Holistic over ballistic — For the best results, approach social as an end-to-end product goal. Don’t rely on punishments alone to make people be nicer (that won’t be enough).
- Behavior is a product of the product (for the most part) — Behavior is a function of a person in their environment, so make sure your design isn’t producing the same social behaviors you’re trying to eliminate.
- Resilience disrupts disruption — Resilient communities resist bad actors. Proactive investment in community-building can reduce disruptive behavior.
- Use moderation in moderation — Unless your product is called “Police State,” a heavy-handed approach to community behavior could cause even model citizens to leave.
- Community is a conversation — Communities are largely defined by what its members talk about. To change a community, change the conversation.
- Consider keeping things closed (at first) — Putting strict limits at first on social interactions can 1) give low trust players a chance to get comfortable, and 2) remove large swaths of problematic behavior. See Lost Garden for more information.
- Sell by solving — There is nothing quite like solving behavior problems to get companies to care about player behavior.
- There’s no silver bullet — No single feature will solve all your social behavior problems.
- There’s no fire and forget — Community behavior is ever-changing and evergreen, so you’ve got to stay on top of it. You can’t add behavior features and just walk away.
- Don’t play with punishments — Penalty duration often makes little difference in changing behavior. Build a penalty escalation ladder, starting with warnings and only changing duration when seriousness isn’t yet clear to players.
- Specificity, not “toxicity” — Toxicity is too broad to target. Focus on more specific behaviors you want to reduce (disruptive) and produce (productive).
- Rewards can wreck your revenue — Extrinsic rewards can hurt your bottom line if you rely on them too much. Find ways to help players feel good about themselves through their own personal and prosocial actions and you’ll need fewer extrinsic rewards.
- Design for the sweet spot — A combination of personal and prosocial incentives produces the greatest social rewards. Designing for the sweet spot can reduce the need for extrinsic encouragement.
- Development teams are poor proxies for strangers — Comparatively speaking, strangers are low trust, developers are high trust. Test with different types of strangers and you’ll get a more accurate understanding of how well your social spaces are working.
- Social kinship over friendship — Help players build extended networks of compatible playmates beyond friends and they will stay, play, and pay more.
- Don’t force friendships — Players will make friends at their own pace and under the right circumstances (which you can help create). Don’t pressure them to add people to their friend lists.
- Don’t limit your audience through neglect — Neglecting accessibility and inclusion often means losing players who might otherwise love your game.
- Always a need for speed — In reality, players don’t like waiting games. Get players playing as quickly as possible.
- What happens in life, happens in games — People bring their lives with them into games. Expect to see it all.
- No trust, no social — A lack of trust will undermine all social experiences. The importance of trust can’t be overemphasized and is a point worth repeating.
Now what?
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